Review: The Angel of Darkness

CARR, Caleb, “The Angel of Darkness”, Little Brown and Company (UK) Ltd., London, 1998.

Octavo; hardcover, with gilt spine titles and rules; 632pp. Mild wear; slightly shaken; spine extremities lightly softened; top corners slightly bumped; text block and page edges somewhat toned. Dustwrapper now backed by archival quality paper and professionally protected by non-adhesive polypropylene wrap. Very good.

If you’ve ever read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose then you will have realised that the character of William of Baskerville is unlike any of the other people in the novel. It’s not just because he’s the ‘hero’ or the ‘good-guy’; it’s because he’s the only one thinking with a Twentieth-Century mind. This is deliberate on Eco’s part and is the point of his whole exercise: people in the Medieval world are quite different in terms of the way they think as compared to modern individuals. In that story, each time a monk winds up dead in some horrific fashion, those around them leap to the conclusion that ‘demons’ or their agents must obviously be at work; proto-sleuth William, on the other hand, seeks rational explanations based upon observation, cause-and-effect, and a solid understanding of human psychology. It’s a sly dig at so-called ‘magical thinking’ and the willful propensity of human beings to seek outré solutions to ordinary events (as well as being a mash-note to Sherlock Holmes).

Eco placed an anachronistic character deliberately into his novel; other writers, in trying to pen a story set in a period other than their own, often end up doing the same thing, only it’s by accident. Sometimes this can be wincingly-bad (Alex Grecian’s The Black Country springs to mind) and, at other times, it’s just a background rumble of discord (as in Susan Hill’s Printer of Devil’s Court), but it is generally noticeable when a writer is outside of their comfort-zone and dabbling with content they don’t fully understand. Either, they skip things which should be included, or they try too hard to show the fruits of their research by name-dropping every (then) current-affairs personality, or by demonstrating their complete mastery of the Mongolian ear-spoon.

Long-time visitors to this blog know that I have very little time for modern authors and that I prefer to read books written in the eras in which they are set, preferably in the 1920s or earlier: hand me a Dornford Yates novel; bother me not with that Jonathan Franzen rubbish! I can generally spot a book that tries too hard to ring true to its setting and it usually takes little more than telling me that the lights are running on gas to clue me in. (Here’s a tip: if a character in your Edwardian novel ‘turns on the gas lights’ rather than just ‘turns on the lights’, you’re probably reading a modern take on a past world.)

Which brings us to Caleb Carr’s The Angel of Darkness. Here, we have people who think in a modern fashion and an author trying to name-check every famous individual, newspaper, or supermarket brand of the time he can get his hands on. It comes across, at times, like a barrage of researched facts, whereas Carr should ideally just have steeped himself in the period so much that he need not have referenced every minor domestic action that characters undertake. They should just be ‘turning on the lights’ rather than ‘pressing the ivory button on the brass-and-walnut panel near the door in order to actuate the gas fixtures in the room’. See what I mean? This is my main quibble with an otherwise excellent story.

This sequel to his first period detective romp The Alienist carries on a year after the events in that first book. In fact, unlike the first book which was – naturally enough – narrated by the journalist John Schuyler Moore, this instalment is told to us by Stevie Taggart, a young child thief in the first novel, now grown up and working as a tobacconist in the New York of the ‘Twenties. (So Carr hinders himself in the period narration stakes by establishing the book as an Edwardian flashback from the Jazz Age meaning that he has to try and make not just one time period ring true, but two.) The story concerns a woman who steals children and then slowly kills them in a version of the Munchausen-by-proxy routine as seen in “The Sixth Sense”, a mental aberration that plays strongly on the “what is normal?” question.

Given that the murderer is a woman, we hear lots of back-and-forth about “a woman’s place”, and “the mothering instinct”, but, as I said, our band of heroes is not typical of their time and they quickly slough off any ties to the patriarchy. In short order, we encounter women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and our team leader Kreizler the psychologist (or “alienist”) has several tantrums about William James’s and Sigmund Freud’s inabilities to see women as social equals. This is all very nice for the modern reader, but it doesn’t ring true to the time period. These are modern people set in a past milieu.

Other biases get played out in the mix as well. Our two proto-CSIs, Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, are only referred-to pejoratively as Jews by people outside of the group and Stevie “Stevepipe” Taggart – a lad of 14 at the time of the events – is indulged in a way that no child of the time would have been. Sarah Howard, the female member of the team, is treated with equanimity as described above. This leaves Cyrus, the black servant. Cyrus is a four-note character – he has a deep voice; he is heavily-muscled; he plays piano and he’s black. This is pretty much all we see of him, other than when he goes about domestic duties or drops a line or two in the discussions of evidence. I suspect that Mr. Carr is a little out of his depth when it comes to people of colour and the result is that Cyrus is almost a blank slate. In fact, it wasn’t until he cropped up in this second book that I remembered him from the first one – he is so thinly-sketched a character that he is eminently forgettable. Nevertheless, he is treated equally by our team members and, inexplicably, is rarely shown prejudice by anybody else in 1900s New York. Weird.

Alright, so issues of race, age and gender aren’t the only things going-on in New York at this time; however, Carr sets himself up with a team of social outcasts and then ignores the issues surrounding them when surely these social barriers paint a much clearer picture of the period than pointing out that a famous opera house of the 1880s has since been turned over to vaudeville? In terms of setting the time and place, Carr resolutely focuses on the light-switches.

All this being said, it’s probably a side issue compared to what Carr is trying to do. Yes, his story is set in New York early last century; yes, his team of characters is a motley crew of socially undesirable types of the period; however it’s likely that Carr’s main issue is to entertain the reader than convince them in terms of the locale. If that’s the case, then he certainly has succeeded. The story contained in this work is definitely engaging, thrilling and filled with the kind of twists and turns that keep a reader guessing. With the sole exception of Cyrus, he writes characters which jump off the page and generate sympathy – or fear - in the reader. Their conversations (social issues aside) are engaging and flow naturally and we begin – kudos to Carr, here – to worry about them.

I’m now going to turn my criticism above on its head. Yes, Carr wallows a little too heavily in the details of the time and place (do we really need to be told more than once that the streets are awash with horse urine?); yes, he name-checks a little too freely, while ignoring certain social mores of the time. And yet, there are moments when this stuff actually makes the read entirely engaging. If you pick up this book, take note of the food, architecture and clothing. Whenever our dogged crew sits down to dine, out rolls a panoply of gourmet delights which will have you drooling. Whenever our heroes drive through New York, we are presented with delightfully-detailed word-pictures of the notable buildings sailing by. Finally, Mr Carr has an eye for fashion and his people, men and women alike, are elegantly attired for the job at hand. Much of this information is handled deftly and well, without bogging-down the narrative or the characterisation; it’s a pity that he couldn’t have applied this lightness of touch across the board.

The main goal of these two books (this one and its prequel) is to show how a Patricia Cornwell-esque murder investigation would have taken place in Edwardian New York. In that sense, it broke the trend of ‘serial killer chic’ which was happening in the 1990s and carved its own niche away from the dross that was pouring forth back then. Carr knows his police procedures and he shows how new forensic techniques were developed, details the resistance to these methods by the Establishment, and also shows how futile earlier techniques were. In The Alienist we were shown attempts to ‘read’ the last vision of a murder victim by examining their retinas and were treated with all kinds of measurements of skull dimensions and eye socket width. In the course of that tale, the nascent discipline of finger-printing is the useful procedure which solves the case; in this outing, the successful method is the use of a sketch artist to capture a suspect of whom no picture is available other than the one in the mind of the witness. Part of the success of these books is that the reader is ‘in the know’ regarding the right methods to adopt and, in turn, bewildered and intrigued by the accepted clunky techniques of the period, not to mention the resistance shown by the Powers That Be to dumping those same outdated techniques.

I have a further quibble – c’mon, this is me! – and it has to do with the language. As I stated above, this time the book is narrated by grown-up Stevie Taggart, who states right up front that he is a plain-spoken type of guy and no fancy writer like John Schuyler Moore. That’s fine; we get it – Stevie’s no Ivy-League alumnus. The text of the book therefore, is toned in such a way that it feels like the product of such an individual and feels entirely plausible. However, like Mark Z. Danielewski in House of Leaves where his narrator makes use of the coinage “alot” rather than “a lot”, Carr insists on using a written tic to try and capture his narrator’s identity and it blows his credibility out of the water. Carr makes Stevie use the word “what” instead of “that”, as in “I walked through the door what opened” rather than “I walked through the door that opened”. Despite the fact that this grammatical snafu makes the reader trip up at every instance - knocking them out of the moment – Stevie’s voice is clearly captured in the writing without this irritating detail and, on the whole, the work suffers because of it rather than being enhanced.

In summation, I quite liked this book, despite its flaws. It has a quirky raison d’être all its own (along with the previous title) and the characters and story are engaging (if somewhat schmaltzy) and entertaining. You could do worse in the serial killer investigation line – like pick up something by Patricia Cornwell, for instance. For those looking for an entrée to the period it’s certainly a good start, although you’d probably be better served starting with something by Edith Wharton, or Henry James. If you were setting your “Cthulhu by Gaslight” game in the US rather than London, there are lots of touchstones here that would serve to authenticate your setting. Another reason to read these books is that “The Alienist” is about to be released as a TV series next year, starring Daniel Brühl (Zemo from Captain America: Civil War) as Laszlo Kreizler, Dakota Fanning as Sarah Howard and Luke Evans as John Schuyler Moore. To my mind, this casting is fantastic and I’m certainly going to check it out.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.